The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
A user interface can rely on a touch-sensitive controller or other pointer device and an on-screen interface. Such an interface can employ language constraints to help the user navigate through the user interface and make easier/faster selections. Such an interface can also employ the language constraints to augment visual feedback in a way that will better guide the user.
Herein, language means a collection of symbols that can be related to different UI elements (distributed in space, for instance on the screen), and that has some inherent constraints (such as N-grams constraints). An example application can be an on-screen keyboard driven by a touch-sensitive remote controller. Such an application can be an important enabling technology for the next generation Internet enabled TV, where interface navigation and text input is needed to interact with services. It is known from U.S. Pat. No. 6,765,557 to use a touchpad for controlling a home entertainment device such as an Interactive television, thereby improving usability. In the U.S. Pat. No. 6,765,557, key inputting and the like using the touchpad are described as examples. In these examples, it would be conceived to use language constraints as described above to support user's inputting. However, the use of language constraints sometimes results in a failure of desired input of the key inputting.